There’s a certain species of critical comment that combines ennui and sophistry. When a critic can shake his head at the terrible state of things these days, he is happy. Anthony Lane, in an appreciation of Davin Lean on his centenary, notes that Jon Stewart had made a joke at the Oscars about watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone; Denby continued:

The glory of Lean was that, with “Lawrence,” he summoned his earliest memory of awe and, perhaps for the last time, restored our illusion that a mass medium could be a miracle. And the sadness of Lean is that he went on clinging to that belief while the rest of us watched it drift away. He died in 1991. Thank heaven he was not around for the iPhone.

I doubt I’m the only person under the illusion that there has been a scrap or two of miraculous mass media since 1963. But let’s think about that iPhone remark. Twenty years ago, we watched Lawrence, if at all, on a 20-inch TV, panned and scanned by a sociopath at Columbia Home Video. Today, we’re well on our way to making widescreen TVs available to most folks; they can easily approximate something close to the quality of the experience of watching a good film in an auditorium.

I didn’t say it would replace that experience—just that, for the first time ever, most films can be enjoyed by most people in a way that largely preserves their aesthetic integrity. It’s a fascinating development—I can’t imagine Lean, who did indeed believe in mass-market miracles, wouldn’t agree—and one too little noticed by those who wax reflexively nostalgic about the good old days that weren’t necessarily.